I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
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Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are 'Suspicious.'

The term “Crackberry” seems silly today — and not just because consumers OD’ed on Blackberry and moved on to iDealers. The term arose in an earlier “aughts” time when Blackberry dominated the smartphone market and lawyers and execs were nearly the only ones who had them, due to their need to be able to respond to email immediately. Things have changed. Now we all need to be able to respond to email immediately. And to tweet. And to instantly share our photos on Facebook. We’re all addicted to technology now, and not just to the Blackberry. We’re “addicted” to our iPhones, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Android, and Pinterest, and iPads, and Word with Friends, and fill-in-the-blank-with-your-digital-dope-of-choice.

The sudden and dramatic advent of social-media-enabling technologies into our lives seems to be causing some mid-digital-life crises. Not only has Silicon Valley developed a guilty conscience about addicting us to screens, we the users are starting to question how technology is changing us: making us fat, making us unhealthy, making us depressed, making us lonely, making us narcissistic, and making us waste time worrying about whether it’s making us fat, unhealthy, depressed, narcissistic and/or lonely. That’s leading some users to consider abandoning the whole enterprise. My colleague Haydn Shaughnessy gave up his smartphone last year. Now, inspired by the example of former Facebooker Katherine Losse, he’s considering giving up Facebook.

Slashdot flagged a German news story in which an expert noted that mass murderers Anders Breivik and James Holmes both lacked much of a social media presence, leading to the conclusion, in Slashdot’s phrasing, that “not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.”

That’s a tad extreme, but I’m seeing the suggestion more and more often that a missing Facebook account raises red flags. After a woman found out via Facebook that a man who’d ‘poked’ her in real life had a long term girlfriend, she turned to digital manners advice givers Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe of Slate to ask whether she should tell the girlfriend. They said she should and then went on a digression about transparent romances in the age of Facebook:

Farhad: I think we’ve mentioned it before that if you are going out with someone and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious.

Emily: Wait a minute. You may have mentioned that.

Farhad: I think I’ve recommended that. You know why, though? Imagine if this guy didn’t have a Facebook profile. That’s why. You should be suspicious of someone who is not making your relationship known publicly on a site like Facebook. I’m going to go on record with that.

Emily: I’m fine with people not having a Facebook page if they don’t want one. However, I think you’re right. If you’re of a certain age and you meet someone who you are about to go to bed with, and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag.

It’s not just love seekers who worry about what the lack of a Facebook account means. Anecdotally, I’ve heard both job seekers and employers wonder aloud about what it means if a job candidate doesn’t have a Facebook account. Does it mean they deactivated it because it was full of red flags? Are they hiding something?

The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).

But it does seem that increasingly, it’s expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity, and that a negative assumption is starting to arise about those who reject the Big Blue Giant’s siren call. Continuing to navigate life without having this digital form of identification may be like trying to get into a bar without a driver’s license.

Case in point: Katherine Losse, the ex-Facebook employee that quit the company and the social network after cashing in her stock options, and who inspired my colleague to consider UnFacebooking, couldn’t stay off Facebookfor long. She wound up opening a new account.

“You can’t get away from it. It’s everything. It’s everywhere,” she told the Washington Post. “The moment we’re in now is about trying to deal with all this technology rather than rejecting it, because obviously we can’t reject it entirely.”

Well, you can, but it might lead to your being rejected down the line too.

* Updated August 7 to include some reasons why a person might choose not to be on Facebook, beyond being too busy planning commando attacks.

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Yes, because if someone doesn’t use Facebook they’re clearly just too old. Or maybe you’re too young, and frankly, naive enough to give away your life’s information to a company that has no interest in protecting your privacy, because you’ve grown up thinking it’s ok to do so. You are the product and you’re being sold.

Those 6 billion poor are not living “just fine”, by and large. If you were to adopt their lifestyle for a week you would agree. A sizable percentage lack or are short of basic necessities like food and water. The vast majority live under corrupt, ineffective governments or dictatorships. Obviously, this does not relate to their Facebook usage, but they are definitely not living “just fine”.

I don’t use the Relationship Status option either. My relationship is between my girlfriend, my *actual* friends, and myself… not my 1200+ social networking connections. FB, for me, is a great tool for communication and information sharing. I don’t like to share much personal information on the site, nor do I like gossip.

” This is coming from the point of view of a 19 year old college student at a top 20 university”

Milx, people might actually start taking your comments seriously when you get to the point in your life where you realize that throwing in the “ I’m from a top 20 university” means absolutely nothing.

You’re a baby and you grew up with the Social Network fad beginning by the time you hit high school. You’re entrenched in it to the point where you cannot see that interactions can exist outside of FB.

Milx’s logic: IF you do not use FB, then you will USUALLY become more socially isolated (if you are not already).

It sounds to me like mommy and daddy just wasted a 100 g’s on their little princess but to no avail to send them to the Ivy. Enjoy your apps Mr Engineer

Ray MacKenzie Just posted ” This is coming from the point of view of a 19 year old college student at a top 20 university”

Milx, people might actually start taking your comments seriously when you get to the point in your life where you realize that throwing in the “ I’m from a top 20 university” means absolutely nothing.

You’re a baby and you grew up with the Social Network fad beginning by the time you hit high school. You’re entrenched in it to the point where you cannot see that interactions can exist outside of FB.

Milx’s logic: IF you do not use FB, then you will USUALLY become more socially isolated (if you are not already).

It sounds to me like mommy and daddy just wasted a 100 g’s on their little princess but to no avail to send them to the Ivy. Enjoy your apps Mr Engineer

To refer to facebook as an “essential” part of Life is really kind of sad. Yes, it is a large part of many people’s lives. Guess what though, it doesn’t need to be! it wasn’t an “essential” part of anyone’s life pre-myspace, if you wanted to see what your friends were up to, you’d call them up and they’d call up other friends and they would call up others and you would all meet up somewhere and hang out and INTERACT PHYSICALLY with one another.

Also pointing out the fact that you are coming from the point of view of a 19yo is about as pointless as anything. You were born into technology. You are practically Borg. You have no history of life BEFORE the internet. Only Vague memories of phones with cords on them and Cellular phones you could kill a horse with. This is coming from a 35yo Network Administrator, who, btw, does have a facebook page but thinks updating my status every 15minutes is just plain retarded. I have managed to reconnect with a few friends from my past, but mostly I use it for the fact that it has a single signon function for many pages that I visit regularly. I, in fact, have NEVER updated a status on my Facebrik page.. even once.

Simply put, pull your head out of the facebook cloud and actually go an interact with people! “soanso is now doing something retarded!” is not interaction.. Try Shaking someone’s hand, or talking to them without using your thumbs. you may find it pretty rewarding!